Donald Trump: Work hard and your kids will, too

Donald Trump

Donald Trump: Work hard and your kids will, too
Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric Trump are all part of the family business, and reportedly not just as figureheads. Evidently, this isn’t by accident: their father raised them to be astute students of real estate.

“I believe supervision, discipline and a strong example to be important,” Trump told Forbes. “My children saw how hard I worked and that created a norm for them. Likewise, they have very strong work ethics. Children watch, and adults have to realize the effect they are having on their children in their behaviors and habits. Children who are spoiled have less of a chance at a well-balanced life.”

Chuck Feeney: Cut off the phone…and the credit card, and the Bergdorf account
You may not have heard of Chuck Feeney, the co-founder of Duty-Free Shoppers Group (those airport shops), but he was once on the Billionaires List. In 1988, Forbes celebrated Feeney as the 23^rd-richest man in the world. But secretly, he’d already transferred all his wealth to his foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies. He was outed in 1998, when he sold his stake in the duty-free business to LVMH. His foundation had given away more than $5.5 billion,and today, Feeney owns neither house nor car. Here, excerpted from his biography, “The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Made and Gave Away a Fortune Without Anyone Knowing,” is an example of how Feeney handled his kids and money:

“He could be a demanding parent. He required the children to work on vacation—Patrick sold ice cream—and to adhere to strict budget rules. He gave his daughters in New York responsibility for paying their expenses out of budgets he allocated so they would learn the value of money. He took this to some lengths. When his daughters and a teenage friend ran up a large phone bill calling boyfriends in Europe from the Manhattan apartment, he came to town, disconnected the telephone, and put a map of New York City on the wall of the living room, on which he circled neighboring pay phones. He hung from it dimes stuck on scotch tape. If friends called on the second phone, which was in the spare bedroom he used, and he happened to be there, he would tell them to call the public phone on Sixty-first and Fifth in five minutes.”

Listen to the experts
Like the rest of us, billionaires are living, breathing experiments in parenting. But Suniya Luthar, Professor of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, actually studies the effect of affluence on children. Her research shows that children of parents with a median annual household income of $125,000 to $130,000 have depression rates that are twice the national average. She blames this on parents who aren’t involved, or who replace quality time with their kids with lavish purchases.

Here is her advice for raising grounded kids:

• “Don’t bail them out,” Luthar instructs. Kids have to learn consequences, and if you’re always rescuing them from bad grades on their report cards, or high credit card bills, they won’t.
• “Try not to be hypercritical,” Luthar advises. “There’s a difference between saying you need to do your best, and saying ‘You didn’t make the soccer team again?!’ or ‘You didn’t make the all-county orchestra?’”
• Don’t turn a blind eye to substance abuse.
• “Keep channels of communication open,” Luthar says. “Sometimes when you say ‘spoiled,’ oftentimes they’re not being spoiled when they’re having a tantrum–it’s coming out of hurt and fear and loneliness.” Be interested in the details of their lives and they’ll feel more grounded.
• Finally, “My first direction would be make sure you’re taking care of yourself. You have to do that in order to achieve A, B, C, and D.”